Rethinking Sex: Alfred Kinsey Now

Kinsey (2004). Written and directed by Bill Condon, produced by Gail Mutrux and Francis Ford Coppola, and distributed by Fox Searchlight. DVD produced by 20th Century Fox.

Ever since Alfred Kinsey electrified the American public with his reports on male and female sexual behavior, published in 1948 and 1953, respectively, which showed that only a fraction of the sexual activity Americans engaged in conformed to traditional morality, conservative groups have attempted to contain the reports' impact by challenging the reliability of Kinsey's data. Particularly troubled by Kinsey's evidence showing that homosexuality constitutes a normal variant of human sexual expression, these critics have argued that Kinsey distorted his findings by incorporating the sexual histories of prostitutes and sex offenders, who were more likely than other Americans to engage in homosexual behavior; thus, they argue, Kinsey could not generalize his findings to the whole of American society.¹ These attacks have intensified with the 2004 release of the biopic Kinsey, a largely sympathetic treatment of the pioneering sex researcher, by the Academy Award–winning director and screenwriter Bill Condon. Citing James H. Jones's 1997 biography Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, which revealed that Kinsey had numerous homosexual encounters while conducting his research and experimented with sadomasochism, groups such as Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council have questioned Kinsey's objectivity as a scientist and have claimed that Kinsey deliberately distorted his findings to normalize his own supposedly abnormal sexual behavior.² Some groups have even gone so far as to compare the publication of the Kinsey reports to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and have characterized their impact on American society as "fifty years of cultural terrorism."³

Condon made his film partly to counter this view of Kinsey and the moralistic attitudes about sex underlying it. He has stated that "it does feel like it's time to remind people of Kinsey's ideas, which I think are liberating."⁴ That Condon would turn to Kinsey's life and work in the face of a resurgence of a conservative politics of sex is hardly surprising. After all, one of Kinsey's goals in publishing the reports was to promote sex reform so that people could engage in nonnormative sexual behavior such as masturbation and lesbianism without feeling shame or guilt. He also thought that in giving the American public access to sexual knowledge, the reports would help to undermine social hierarchies based on sexual behavior. As early as 1939, when Kinsey was just beginning his research on sex, he told the newly elected members of Phi Beta Kappa at Indiana University, where he taught zoology and biology, that psychologists and psychiatrists had taken over the role of regulating sex from religious institutions and that they labeled forms of sexual behavior as "abnormal" without knowing how common they were.⁵ He went on to condemn traditional morality on the grounds that it did not take into consideration existing sexual variation: "Social forms and moral codes are prescribed as though all individuals were identical, and we pass judgments, make awards, and heap penalties without regard to the diverse difficulties involved when such different people face uniform demands."⁶ In arguing that society hierarchized people according to their sexual behavior, Kinsey anticipated Gayle Rubin's analysis in her classic essay "Thinking Sex," which many scholars consider one of the founding texts of queer studies. Like Rubin, Kinsey believed that sex operated as a system of social stratification, and he emphasized sexual behavior over sexual identity, thereby acknowledging, as Rubin later would, that heterosexuals were as vulnerable to sexual shaming as homosexuals.⁷

For the most part, Condon's biopic focuses on the Kinsey who courageously brought sex into the open and in so doing contributed to the development of a more liberal sexual culture. But even as it emphasizes the controversial sex researcher's historical importance, the film struggles to represent Kinsey'...